28 REFUGEES T HE poet Zinbanti is tal] and elegant and he was shot in the back eleven years ago. The wound healed, of course. The doctor who, rattling the bullet in his cupped palm, spoke to reporters after the oper- ation said that it had passed within a centimetre of the heart. "Zinbanti's heart is somewhat larger than you ex- pect to encounter, even in a man of his height, one of the African race," the doctor said. "It is an extraordinary heart, gentlemen, at the extreme end of the spectrum." The journalists- there were two of them, and their very presence in that country, in the wake of ZInbanti's escape attempt and the immediate tightening and proliferation of security, was a kind of miracle -wrote the doctor's words down carefully, and photographed him hold- ing the bullet in the air. The New York Tunes clipping that documents th is event is now yellowing and frail; it was tucked inside one of Zinbanti's letters to Alfred, inserted between a long description of scarabs and a short one of his second wife. Perhaps Zinbanti has never heard of Xerox machines, Alfred thinks. Perhaps there is not a single Xerox machine in his whole country. No wonder they are always on the brink of revolution. The bul1et in the photograph is in very sharp focus. The doctor, pinch- ing it lightly between thumb and fore- finger, stares at it like a child at a moth. Alfred exhales cigarette smoke, closing his eyes. It is very odd, when you think about it. Even a narrow- minded, provincial, elderly physician could be moved, when speaking of Zinbanti, to talk of hearts, of ex- tremes, of the thread by w hie h a life is sai d to hang. For nearly a year now, Alfred has been startled by Zinbanti's letters: the angular clarity of the handwriting, the stamps engraved with sleeping lions. He began writing to Zinbanti with reluctance. U psinger, the chairman of the English department, hoped that Zinbanti would stand as a candidate for the Telemann Endowment, which involved a series of lectures to be given at the University of Colorado at Boul- der. U psinger believed that a corre- spondence between poets would be the most certain way to Zinbanti's heart. Alfred wrote to Zinbanti; he was pleased with the sharpness and charm of his own letter. Zinbanti considered. He seemed to pause, falter, and retreat; Alfred, in the name of the Telemann committee, persisted. It was clear by that time that Zinbanti was the man they wanted. His newest work, "Flora and Fauna"-written during his eight / r I X " l / / --- - ;( \ , L :' ' :" k \ \ !Ñ I ,:\ " !, ': \,-" v>-> - ","': ( " 1" , ì ...:::::: ,,: c ) ____ C- J 1 "If I'm not being too personal, how much do you pay for a cord of wood?" years in prison following the escape attempt-had exactly the kind of slender, undaunted reputation that U psinger was looking for. Alfred coaxed He researched Zinbanti's life, finding old photographs of Zinbanti's village in an ancient encyclopedia: the women with their scarified brows, matchstick legs, and glossy bellies; the children combing fallen grains of wheat from the dust with knobby fingers. Alfred called Zinbanti. The connections were invariably riddled with static, and Zinbanti proved ex- tremely telephone-shy. When he fi- nally agreed-one night after Alfred had been talking into the rise and fall of static for nearly forty minutes -to accept the T elemann Endow- ment, Alfred got drunk on Gordon's gin, which he somehow associated with ...t\frica. He woke in the dead of night with a feeling of confused urgency; he had been dreaming of escaping in a helicopter from a bar- ren, level country that, even in the dream, he knew he did not recog- nIze. Now, lying on his bed, he thinks of that country. There was a single highway, ashen and gray, immaculate as only highways that cross immense deserts can be. There were no lines on the highway. Alfred stares at the ceil- ing. He is smoking one of Lisa's ciga- rettes; when they were living together, he used to steal them from the pocket of her russet suède jacket whenever they were in movie theatres. She is the only woman he has ever known who keeps her cigarettes in her pockets. This cigarette he stole during "The Last Metro." In the darkness, she misinterpreted the lightness of his touch. "Christ, Alfred," she said. "Can't you even wait until the cartoon is over?" She is married; they used to go to movies often. ((I'm not psycho- logically equipped to have a lover," she said the last time. "Really . You don't believe me?" "No," he said. Once, when she buried her hand in the popcorn carton-grainy cardboard printed with shooting stars-he kissed the butter from her knuckles Her hand had gotten so slick with butter that her wedding ring had slid from her finger to the bottom of the carton. "Like a Cracker Jack prize," Alfred said. "It's not funny, Alfred," she said. Without looking at him, she slipped the buttery ring deep into the bottom of her russet suède pocket.